Some Scattered Thoughts, or Re:Membering

What follows, as implied by the title above, are some loose thoughts about various media properties: Assassin's Creed, Kingdom Hearts, and Stranger Things. You could say the common thread that ties these video games and television show together is precisely the theme of "scattered thoughts", or "remembering" something that was not necessarily your own memory to begin with.

I am currently reading Cameron Kunzelman's book Everything Is Permitted: On Assassin's Creed, which I couldn't recommend more highly. Kunzelman writes with impressive clarity while walking through arguments that are technical, theoretical, allegorical, or sometimes a combination of the three. The first chapter deals with the Animus, the science fictional technology that drives the plot of Assassin's Creed games and lets characters access the memories of their ancestors in a simulated virtual environment. Kunzelman repeatedly highlights that the Animus, as an interface, takes on the paradoxical burden shared by all interfaces: that to succeed at being an interface means to render itself invisible and fabricate an immediate (literally, "not mediated") connection to whatever is being interfaced with. Not only does the Animus take on this burden on multiple levels (both in the games' fictional narrative and in the visual/mechanical design of the games themselves), but the balance between the appearance and disappearance of the Animus's interface is part of how Ubisoft developed the Assassin's Creed franchise.

By coincidence, I was reading this analysis around the same time my wife and I barreled through the last 80% of Stranger Things, and it was difficult not to see the similarities between the Animus and Project NINA from the show's fourth season. The first three seasons of Stranger Things had established that, through sensory deprivation, Eleven can psychically project herself to locate people, spy on them, or communicate telepathically. The methods of sensory deprivation range from simple radio static and blindfolds to bathtubs filled with salt water or large water tanks from the laboratory from which Eleven originally escaped in the first season. The more that Eleven is desensitized to her immediate surroundings, the better she can extend her senses elsewhere.

The primary themes of Stranger Things 4 are trauma, guilt, and shame. Eleven is ashamed to tell Mike that she has trouble fitting in, Will struggles with his feelings for Mike, and Vecna's introduction as the show's main villain proceeds as he psychically preys on teenagers in a way that is so similar to Freddy Krueger that the comparison is made explicit in the script's dialogue. This is important context for Project NINA, which is the most advanced sensory deprivation apparatus that Eleven uses, and it is built specifically for her to relive her past trauma, not to perform psychic reconnaissance in the present as usual. In other words, NINA is similar to the Animus from Assassin's Creed. While Eleven is reliving her own memories with NINA and not someone else's, there is a game-like quality to how Eleven interfaces with NINA. Like in Assassin's Creed, the simulation resets itself as Eleven initially struggles to break out of the sequence of the events that she is supposed to relive.

For the past few months, I've been playing through the Kingdom Hearts video game compilations. My pace has regrettably slowed down after I reached the games I hadn't played before, but I'm having fun overall. Admittedly, Kingdom Hearts doesn't neatly map onto the comparisons I've made between Assassin's Creed and Stranger Things. While there are many instances where Kingdom Hearts characters access each other's memories or enter virtual realities, it deals in a cartoon fantasy logic as opposed to the science fiction genre conventions of the other two franchises. In Kingdom Hearts, a computer or a digital object is simply another thing that can be magical, and the way that characters' minds bleed into each other is driven by emotional resonance and overlapping identities instead of psychic telepathy. Notably, the one character that possesses instrumental psychic powers is called a "witch". It's not called "Kingdom Minds", after all.

What dwells on my mind as I play Kingdom Hearts is how it operates as a franchise. One of Kunzelman's broader points in Everything Is Permitted is that the components of the Assassin's Creed franchise, including the Animus, are flexible and can be made to fit Ubisoft's changing needs. The newer models of the Animus in later Assassin's Creed games do not require an ancestral connection to the past, which makes for more convenient narrative development. Similarly, the psychic powers in the world of Stranger Things can be harnessed as a plot device to provide the necessary backstory as the show approaches its climax.

From its inception, Kingdom Hearts has maintained a signature approach to level design by injecting the protagonists into worlds from various Disney films like Alice in Wonderland or Aladdin. The plot, setting, and characters for a given film are deployed as necessary. For instance, the Agrabah level in Kingdom Hearts tracks the plot of the original Aladdin movie, in which Jafar kidnaps Princess Jasmine and ultimately gets trapped in a genie lamp after wishing to become a genie himself. The Halloween Town level based on The Nightmare Before Christmas avoids Christmas entirely, but this plot point is taken up in Kingdom Hearts II where Sora, Donald, and Goofy can revisit Jack Skellington and be surprised by his new fascination with the winter holiday. Another interesting case is the "Land of Dragons" level based on Mulan. The character Mushu is a summonable ally in Kingdom Hearts but is not a character in the plot. When Sora and co. stumble upon Mulan in Kingdom Hearts II, however, Mushu remembers the events of the previous game and is able to introduce Mulan and Sora. Other Disney characters, like Tron, are more integral to the lore of Kingdom Hearts, and I haven't even touched on the Final Fantasy characters...

Like I said, these are scattered thoughts. I just wanted to try and write something besides technical documentation, so if you got this far then you have my sincerest thanks. There are many other threads to pull on and think through, and I expect to do so as I finish Cameron Kunzelman's book. (Or rather, his second book. His first book is also good.) His ruminations on fandom culture, lore, and conspiracy seem especially poignant as Stranger Things enters its bizarre afterlife. There are also other academics and critics who have written specifically about Kingdom Hearts that I should seek out.

-Nick