This article contains spoilers for The Caligula Effect 2
Ever since time immemorial, people have clung to different concepts as a way to make sense of the world and, more importantly, themselves. For a long time, this concept was religion; the divine was judge and jury of human identity, societies were built around worship and the sole concept of non-religiousness was nonexistent. Religion helped people make sense of a hostile and weird world—and, at the same time, gave rise to countless atrocities committed in its name. Religion gave people identity but, at the same time, constructed other identities, other religions (or non-religiousness) as aberrations to be shunned, subjugated, or exterminated.
But as Nietzsche aptly put it, God is dead, and we killed him with our own hands. But the human need of something to latch on to, a concept to give sense to our lives, did not vanish with it. Through the centuries preceding our own twenty-first, this absence of God was substituted by the nationalism that rose as a device needed to the building of the new nations that were in the process of emerging in Europe. Man no longer answered to God, he answered to Nation (although, of course, nationalisms often included religion within their ideological bases). And this nationalism would directly lead to the rise of fascist and totalitarian states throughout the twentieth century, the atrocities and hatred that they created being still very much alive in our modern age.
But the creation and widespread propagation of the internet created, for the first time in the history of humanity, a network of immediate exchange of information, of human relations, that connected the nigh entirety of the planet together. For the many of us that that grew up within this digital realm, and I would assume that for many of the children who will live their lives in this new hyper-internetized world as well, the Internet rendered moot any sort of ascription to a nation, to a local, physical place. McLuhan’s Global Village was our town, the digital world our nation, our relationships built across distances, languages, cultures.
But our identity needs as humans did not fade. God can not fill that void, nor can Nation. What then, can these Internet-grown pockets of digital youths latch on to make sense of their lives?
Redo is a world apparently ruled by the virtuadoll Regret. Her music is everywhere, a mass phenomenon, enjoyed and rabidly consumed by the masses. For the regret-filled people that were transported to Redo, Regret becomes the icon of their happiness, the creator of this land of joy. They worship her, and she gives sense to their lives. Regret is God.
God is a singer. Religion is Fandom.
The religions, the nations, the tribes of the 21st digital century are fandoms. Marvel films, gaming, K-Pop, otaku media, Genshin Impact if you will—all and more have massive online presence among internauts. While a statement like “Fandoms are modern religions” might seem like an exaggeration, I believe that anyone who has seen, either from within or from the outside, the attitudes hardcore fandom people have towards their media of choice, would come to understand the truth within: Ascription to the Fandom gives people Identity, a community of like-minded individuals, a Culture of their own centered around a particular piece of media. And like the previous identity-building concepts of God and Nation, similar radical attitudes pop in Fandom spaces. One need only see the constant infighting fandom communities are constantly immersed in: Who is a “true fan”, who consumes the right or wrong kind of media—this type of “anti” mentality can be likened to this fandom-based type of identity construction: When you are the media you consume, anyone else will seem to be the media they consume as well. And these fandom identities are not lost to the capitalist forces behind said media: We can observe, for example, the way media outlets harvested hate clicks from hardline Marvel fans with the very intentional publication of movie directors’ criticisms of the superhero franchise in the wake of Scorsese’s polemic statements on it. If you yourself are Media, then any attack on that media will also be an attack on you.
And much like nationalism incorporated religion, internet fandom has too been weaponized by the reactionary forces of nationalism and fascism to further their own ends: Nazis have routinely targeted young and vulnerable people in gaming spaces to radicalize, and it was not much long ago when the GamerGate movement was in full force, serving as a mouthpiece for reactionary agents to sink their teeth into young people who found in it a form of identity. And while I can not speak of the Japanese netsphere, I would be led to believe that netouyo possibly operate similarly in the realm of otaku culture. Caligula 2 is no stranger to this weaponization of media and fandom, as can be seen in the character of Kudan.
Unlike the other composers, Kudan is not an eminently artistic figure but a political one, serving as the self-proclaimed propagandist that keeps everyone uncritically fixated on Regret. She’s a silver-tongued liar and manipulator, fabricating lies about the Go-Home Club in order to present them as the enemy to destroy: She does this by using the power of Fandom itself, by utilizing Redo’s inhabitants’ love and dependency of Regret in order to radicalize them into violent hatred. This idea is made explicit in the lyrics of her song, Miss Conductor: “The beat drops—it’s our radicalism/nationalism”: Art is our Nation. Aesthetic choices that surrond her also serve to reinforce her status as a propagandist of radicalization: The lyric video that surrounds the battlefield while fighting Digiheads at AMORE is littered with Iron Crosses, and she herself is wearing a jacket in the characteristic olive drab and black of Wehrmacht uniforms, putting her in line with the Third Reich’s extreme nationalism and propaganda.
Now, I do not believe Kudan herself is fascist, but rather think that these stylistic choices serve more to represent her as a metaphor for the type of real-world internet extremist that utilizes fandom as a conduit for radicalization. If anything, Kudan is characterized by a complete lack of morals: She does what she does to further her own goals, independent of any ethics or morality.
Kudan’s parallel is Niko, the girl who killed her own identity in order to please her environment. Kudan, comparatively, is the opposite: She manipulates everyone around her, morals be damned, in order to fulfill the conditions of her own identity. But much like Niko’s identity is beholden to her parents, Kudan is neither as independent of a person as she believes herself to be; she is held down from true personal and individual identity by her politician father. She too is, in a way, victim to the inherent human wish for identity constructs, having based her entire self in helping her father, never having truly developed her own personal individuality.
But this darkness of fandom identities is not the only thing popular subcultural media is. Caligula 2 is a game that clearly loves music, loves art, and is full of compassion for the people who, misguided by their own personal suffering and vulnerabilities, turn to it as a way to make sense of their own lives in a hostile world. Caligula does not condemn escapism, but neither does it coddle it: It believes in the gentleness of the artistic experience, the enjoyment of art and the power it has to soothe suffering, but firmly states that art and media must never what makes up the ego, the self. Art is a companion. Chi is Art itself: She is not human, she’ll never be, and her own identity exists only because of humanity itself. Throughout the game, she learns to love humanity and vows to give back the love she has encountered and received, to soothe the sufferings of the people but never solving them, as that is not something she can do. Regret appeared to be able to solve the sufferings of humanity, but that too was a lie, a form of escapism that was prime to manipulation and radicalization. And she too, as the human she is, was hurt by this extreme idealization of her, of having become a God to the people, in the same way Kiriko burned out after being put in a divine pedestal by her fans.
Ultimately, Caligula 2’s final lesson is one of acknowledgment of the pain of existence, the suffering inherent to life and the unfairness of the world, but also one that always sees the morning sun at the end of the night, not through false deities, nations or an unhealthy association with media, but through the genuine healing and transformative power of art, and the belief in oneself and one’s own identity, a life lived in company of those we choose to love and in turn choose to love us. Because Chi will always be there with you.
Sparks Locker 